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The Difference between Good and Great

By Roy Peter Clark

On the morning of Oct. 8, 2007, I found myself in New York, reading the local newspapers in search of a great headline. I ignored the New York Times because of an old bias that the best headline writers wind up working for the tabloids.

Who could forget -- if it really saw the light of day -- the headline, "Headless Body in Topless Bar"? It takes the power of parallelism and kicks it up a notch.

On the previous evening, I had watched my New York Yankees lose to the Cleveland Indians 2-1, a loss that would help knock them from the playoffs. But this low-scoring game was no ordinary pitchers' duel. In the eighth inning, with the Yanks ahead by one run, a biblical plague of tiny insects swarmed all over Joba Chamberlain, the young Yankee pitcher, shaking his confidence and control, costing New York the game. Joba turned to Job.

The insect infestation offered a field day for headline writers at the New York tabs, an opportunity for me to observe public wordplay at its most clever. I collected three examples that scored for me a swing and miss, a solid single to center, and a home run blast.

I was not impressed by the most obvious play on words, the use of "bug" as a verb or "buggy" as an adjective, as in "Cleveland drives Yanks buggy," or "Cleveland bugs young pitcher." Such examples display what I call "first level creativity," wordplay that any clever 12-year-old could conjure.

"This Bites" was much better. It expressed not only the bug event but the team and fan frustration that followed. As a journalist, however, I had to take off points for inaccuracy. The tiny winged pests were called "midges," a cousin of the mosquito not known for its ferocious biting. So while the players were mightily pestified, none was, strictly speaking, bitten.

Which is why I award this headline the prize for best wordplay: "Let us spray." Three one-syllable words. Ten letters. A single letter added to "Let us pray." And the Newsday headline writer, Wayne Kermode, assistant editor, sports, gets to circle the bases. With an accompanying photo of trainers spraying the players and umpires with bug repellent, "Let us spray" captures the event and the mood.

Here's some advice:

*Look for opportunities to play with words. Don't be afraid to play with words even when the subject matter is serious. Poets play with words when they write poems in honor of the dead.

*Don't settle for the first wordplay that comes to mind. Write it down, but riff off it.

*You may need 10 tries before you hit on a great one.

*Save examples of clever wordplay.

*Bounce your clever phrases off others. 

Full post as published by Writing Tools on November 07, 2007 (boomark / email).